In an ongoing study of 105 children, aged 6-15 years old, who have previously been labelled by clinicians as autistic or schizophrenic, three frequently used schemes of diagnosis--from Rutter (autism), from Rimland (autism), and from Creak (schizophrenia) serve to aggregate functional categories of the children's measured language and perception skills less well then simple tripartite divisions (low, middle, high) or scores on the Frostig visual perception test, and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test: there are more significant high Fs when the variance groups are high, middle and low Frostig scorers or PPVT scorers than when variance groups are autistic (Rimland and Rutter), schizophrenic (Creak), nonclassified emotionally distrubed. Furthermore, the Frosting-PPVT intercorrelation (r equals .88) in our psychotic sample is significantly higher than that for our normal age-matched controls (r equals .15). As these findings suggest a link between visual perception and vocabulary skills in the psychotic children, and further, as recent research in cognitive psychology suggests theoretical models of such a link, we propose to test 72 children from the present sample (24 autistic, 24 schizophrenic, 24 nonclassified emotionally disturbed) on three types of tests: vocabulatory-definitional subtests of the WAIS/WISC/WPPSI, Stanford-Binet and PPVT; visual perception tests including Frostig, the Embedded Figures Test, Matching Familiar Figures, and visual subtests of the WISC/WPPSI and Stanford-Binet; and, third, a perceptual judgements percepts tests. We will use these data in order to explore the relationship between language and perception for diagnosis, etiology, and possible treatment.